I despise VOIP customers that move and fail to update their provider, then get all upset when they call 911 and get their previous hometown operator.

OH, it was a cell phone? Looks like whoever operates the cell tower she connected through needs to check their routing. 911 routing is complex and if you mistype 1 number in that route, that call could end up anywhere. Our local cell tower techs are constantly working on towers and thus constantly conducting test calls to make sure the routes are set up correctly.

FTFA: If you make a call from inside your home, like Lewis did, the cell phone signal does not always have a clear path. This makes it possible for a call to skip cell phone towers and bounce to a different state, according to the CBS Minnesota report

Now I'm no telecommunications engineer, but I'm pretty sure the half watt UHF transmitter in your phone can't do that. A cell phone is a long wave length on purpose to prevent long distance skips as described.

"If you make a call from inside your home, like Lewis did, the cell phone signal does not always have a clear path. This makes it possible for a call to skip cell phone towers and bounce to a different state, according to the CBS Minnesota report"

Uh huh. Did the signal bounce off some swamp gas from a weather balloon that was trapped in a thermal pocket three states over? Or were Wayne and Garth screwing with the signal again?

I'm going to assume something on the back end was screwed up./former techie....shiat happens//has seen someone accidentally bring down part of the backbone because they farked up while in one of the routers controlling it. that was fun.///wasn't me!

Around here the first thing they ask if you call 911 on a cell phone is what county you're in. Which is super helpful in a place where 60% of the people are here on vacation and there's 2 states and 6 counties.

FTFA: If you make a call from inside your home, like Lewis did, the cell phone signal does not always have a clear path. This makes it possible for a call to skip cell phone towers and bounce to a different state, according to the CBS Minnesota report

Meh. Try calling poison control from a VoiP phone. Same thing happens. Be in Florida, get answered in...wait for it....New York.

And the same problem happens ALL the time on a smaller level....live in a small city, call 911, get the County Sheriff. Granted, those snafus only take a few seconds to transfer to correct, but seconds matter .The only way to solve the problem in the article is to require automatic location reporting from every cell phone when you dial 911. And after the firestorm about the NSA, how well do you think THAT will go over?

PSA: Even if you have a regular old fashion phone plugged into your house without service, you can pick it up and dial 911, and bypass the cellphone location headaches (or, say, after a storm when your neighborhood tower has been knocked out/overloaded/etc.)

Meh. Try calling poison control from a VoiP phone. Same thing happens. Be in Florida, get answered in...wait for it....New York.

And the same problem happens ALL the time on a smaller level....live in a small city, call 911, get the County Sheriff. Granted, those snafus only take a few seconds to transfer to correct, but seconds matter .The only way to solve the problem in the article is to require automatic location reporting from every cell phone when you dial 911. And after the firestorm about the NSA, how well do you think THAT will go over?

That already exists, it's why cell phones in the USA are required to have GPSa at a minimum. It just doesn't work all the time, or quickly enough.

Tom_Slick:FTFA: If you make a call from inside your home, like Lewis did, the cell phone signal does not always have a clear path. This makes it possible for a call to skip cell phone towers and bounce to a different state, according to the CBS Minnesota report

Now I'm no telecommunications engineer, but I'm pretty sure the half watt UHF transmitter in your phone can't do that. A cell phone is a long wave length on purpose to prevent long distance skips as described.

Ah, T-mobile. There's your problem. They patch everyone in the north through the cell network to a OC96 line Bell Atlantic forgot about in the late 90s in Queens. It's part of their clever cost cutting to make the service so affordable.

I despise VOIP customers that move and fail to update their provider, then get all upset when they call 911 and get their previous hometown operator.

That was my guess, given the distance.

Cool story:I recently broke into an apartment based on a 911 call. "32 [Generic Street Name], floor 2, for an elderly male, fell and unable to get up." After arriving and finding locked doors and windows, hearing nothing inside, and confirming the address with dispatch, we popped the back door and went in. Searched every room, found no one, and saw much evidence that an old person did not live there. As we were advising dispatch that we were clearing the scene, they said, "Disregard. Caller is in [next city over]."

I'm lucky I didn't get a shotgun blast to the chest, or a pitbull chomping my ass.

Figured it was from a cell. When I took CPR classes they said to make sure the first thing you tell the operator is what city you need 911 for. 911 calls from a cell phone in my area always go to operators in a city about 30 miles south of where I live.

I despise VOIP customers that move and fail to update their provider, then get all upset when they call 911 and get their previous hometown operator.

That was my guess, given the distance.

Cool story:I recently broke into an apartment based on a 911 call. "32 [Generic Street Name], floor 2, for an elderly male, fell and unable to get up." After arriving and finding locked doors and windows, hearing nothing inside, and confirming the address with dispatch, we popped the back door and went in. Searched every room, found no one, and saw much evidence that an old person did not live there. As we were advising dispatch that we were clearing the scene, they said, "Disregard. Caller is in [next city over]."

I'm lucky I didn't get a shotgun blast to the chest, or a pitbull chomping my ass.

Our FD would never go in without LEO on scene. That's quite ballsy of you guys.

911Jenny:I would've bet a paycheck she was using a VOIP phone. I would've lost. That's a big skip for that signal to make.

That's because it did not make that skip. Something else happened, like someone said, either using a misconfigured wifi voip hotspot which some carriers are rolling out to lessen network load. Or more likely, Tmobile has a problem with their routing/translations.

Back in the day, even with an error in the datafill, it would have gone to a somewhat nearby city, since carriers kept switching centers near the geographic area due to backhaul costs (most calls stay in the local area). But in the past decade those costs dropped significantly, and it can be cheaper to backhaul whole markets to another location, or just have a local BSC to the market, (smaller local office footprint) backhauled to the most critical routing hardware is in larger cities.

/Works in telecom as a switch technician, has done some E911 translations on new tower turns ups before

GaperKiller:Around here the first thing they ask if you call 911 on a cell phone is what county you're in. Which is super helpful in a place where 60% of the people are here on vacation and there's 2 states and 6 counties.

/mountain problems

Huh? Is this sarcasm? When I'm on vacation I rarely know the name of the county in which I am vacationing.

I despise VOIP customers that move and fail to update their provider, then get all upset when they call 911 and get their previous hometown operator.

That was my guess, given the distance.

Cool story:I recently broke into an apartment based on a 911 call. "32 [Generic Street Name], floor 2, for an elderly male, fell and unable to get up." After arriving and finding locked doors and windows, hearing nothing inside, and confirming the address with dispatch, we popped the back door and went in. Searched every room, found no one, and saw much evidence that an old person did not live there. As we were advising dispatch that we were clearing the scene, they said, "Disregard. Caller is in [next city over]."

I'm lucky I didn't get a shotgun blast to the chest, or a pitbull chomping my ass.

NIXON YOU DOLT!!!!!:lizyrd: As we were advising dispatch that we were clearing the scene, they said, "Disregard. Caller is in [next city over]."

You need these guys.

A carpenter from the city definitely went there and fixed the door. I'd point out that he's a public works employee, not a fire department employee. We don't break down enough wrong doors to warrant our own carpenter...unlike the LAPD apparently. Though given that department's size, I'm sure that fixing accidentally broken citizens' stuff is a minor part of his job.